


Achoros

by northerntrash



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: 445 BC in Athens, Alternate Universe - Ancient Greece, Ancient History, Conspiracy, Eventual Romance, M/M, Slow Burn, and Bilbo is an impoverished citizen in need of a break, in which Thorin is an unimpressed Athenian metic, references to war and violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-09-12
Packaged: 2018-02-13 17:18:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2158806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northerntrash/pseuds/northerntrash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year is 445 BC, Athens is rebuilding after decades of war, and the city is tired. Peace has been won, but at a cost, and civic unrest grows worse with each passing day. Wealthy families suddenly find themselves ruined, the disenfranchised are expected to provide for a city that denies their rights, and the old men sit in their assemblies and mutter amongst themselves.</p><p>Bilbo just wants a comfortable life; all Thorin is after is the right to a home. If they can put aside what separates them, they might just succeed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

 **ἄχωρος**  /achoros/ ak-o-ros   _without resting place, homeless_

 

* * *

 

 _Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances_ \- Herodotus 7.49

 

The sun was high overhead, and the streets were at their busiest.

He propped himself up against a column, trying his hardest to look inconspicuous and to avoid the curious gaze of the man running the stall behind him, whose look was growing gradually colder as he realised that Bilbo had no intention of buying anything, or of moving. This position gave him both a decent place to observe the milling crowds, and kept him enough in the shade to avoid the worst of the heat from the heavy summer day.

The sunlight beat down, and the air was humid, but it was not enough to keep the masses out of the city’s central market place, most glancing over the wares on offer in the stalls littered throughout the colonnades but some just wandering, talking idly, barely paying attention the world around them. A man stood on the speaker’s platform preaching peace and prosperity; the merchants shouted in both Greek and other tongues to each other from behind their stalls; a curious man in Persian garb regarded the bronze statues littering the space with the careful and considering eye of a collector.

A normal day, in the city of Athens.

Bilbo turned his head to one side slightly, and decided that it was unlikely to get any busier.

It was time to make a move.

He would have preferred it to be darker, dusk perhaps, so that a man might not notice him approach, but the streets were much emptier as night approached, everything quieter, making it harder to duck away should he be spotted before he was successful. 

And still he wasn’t entirely convinced that he would be successful.

Five years ago, had he been told that he would be reduced to the state of cutting purses in the middle of the city he might have laughed, or more likely quoted some philosophical doctrine on the nature of man and crime before raising an eyebrow knowingly at him. Though their circumstances had not exactly been ideal back then, it had hardly been the precarious situation he was in now, his family's debts a constant weight and the threat of the revoke of his citizenship becoming more real with each passing month.

He was starting to dream about those debts. He would prayed for guidance on their meaning, but he didn't think that was really necessary.

His mother, rest her soul, had laughed when the man in charge of their estate had come to them both – for despite the fact that with his father and brother’s death he was the head of the family, he would not consider any action that impacted the family without her by his side – and told them, rather anxiously, of the state of their affairs. It had not been what either of them had expected.

She’d stared at the man for a long moment, before she had thrown her face to the rafters and laughed, though it had been a hollow and desperate sound.

"Did you know?" she asked him, and Bilbo had shaken his head in reply. 

"He said nothing." His father had always done his best to keep his worries from his family; a kindness in theory. 

Useless in practise. It left them here, taken by surprise, with no understanding of how they were supposed to save themselves.

“I’ll speak to my father,” she’d told him, when they were alone again. “He’ll find a way.”

And Bilbo's Grandfather had, for a time; his aid had been enough to see them remain in their home for as long as his mother had lived, for which he was grateful. She had never been fond of their house in the city (neither was he, for that matter, but it was all that they had left now), and he was glad that she had died in her own bed, the leaves on the trees she had known for decades casting fine grey-gold shadows on the floor. He’d held her hand as insects had whirred noisily outside and had carried on holding it after it had gone cold, as the sun had lowered in the sky and the shadows had stretched longer.

He hadn’t wept; they’d known for a while that the Gods were going to take her and he had come to terms with the inevitable, but he had felt strangely raw when he had finally stood from her bedside and left the room, shutting the door with a quiet, deferential click behind him.

He’d sold the house and their lands the next day. He’d had the contract set up for some weeks, but hadn't had the heart to sign whilst Belladonna had lived.

The truth of the matter had been that whilst his Grandfather had been willing to help as much as he could, it would never have been enough. Not only were debts too significant, the old man himself was little different to many Athenians these days, after so many long years of civil service, of so much demanded in the name of Athens. 

Too many years of war.

Peace had seemed impossible to win back then, out there in countryside; there was too many sons dead and coffers were running too empty to really allow for hope. They said that the new statue in the temple on the Athenian acropolis would shine with gold and ivory once it was finished; it was probably true, but that didn’t mean that children weren’t starving in the streets, or that families were not peddling their heirlooms to the merchants in the port to make ends meet.

Athens gleamed white with marble, but many people still slept in the dirt.

His Grandfather’s lands had diminished five-fold since he had got those scars, and he still had Granddaughters yet unwed, his responsibility now their fathers lay in the mass graves of the soldiers; he still had men that relied on him for a wage, other family that had needed his help. He’d married four times in his long life, and had the extensive family to prove it.

Bilbo couldn’t take more from him than had already been offered, not to keep land that hadn’t turned a profit for thirty years and doubtless never would again. 

The money from the sale was enough to pay his Grandfather back, with some left over to take the edge of the debts. He’d go to Athens, he’d find his old teacher and convince him, somehow, to set him up in a teaching position. The man hadn’t come to his mother’s funeral, and Bilbo had not seen him in years, but that meant little in these tumultuous times: he knew that he lived still, in the city, and he had to hope that his fondness for both Bilbo and his parents lingered still.

He’d not told his Grandfather this, just put the bag of coins down on the man’s desk and offered a small smile.

The man had looked tired, and suddenly much older than he usually did. 

“Where will you go?”

“The city,” Bilbo had replied. “It may be many years until I see you again, Grandfather. May the Gods keep you safe until we meet again.”

His tone was one of careful respect, and he had made sure to keep the grief from his voice, for all that he was sure that it was blindingly visible in his eyes.

His Grandfather had poked the bag, and sighed as the gold clinked gently against each other inside.

“I didn't give my daughter aid with the intention of you paying it back, you know.”

Bilbo smiled, but it was a weak effort.

“And yet still I will; a Baggins does not sit well with debts, you know.”

He himself had not understood the extent of his financial ruin until the reigns of it had been thrust upon him; no one would yet know that more money was still owed elsewhere. But he would not be able to leave the countryside knowing that he’d left his Grandfather struggling, for all that it might have eased his way in his new life.

The old man smiled, staring at Bilbo's shoulder. No doubt he too was remembering Bilbo's father, who had said those exact words often in his life. 

It was a pity, Bilbo thought in his less charitable moments, that he had never thought to follow them, rather than just saying them. 

“What will you do?”

“I have it in hand,” Bilbo told him, which was something of a lie, and the old man had sighed, running a hand across the scars on his neck; they were long and twisting, ridged across tendons and skin turned papery with age; his Grandfather had had them for as long as he could remember.

Most men had scars now, from one battle or another. 

“Half, then,” his Grandfather had said, pouring out the bag of coins and splitting them roughly in two. “But I won’t take it all back from Belladonna’s only living son. How many slaves are you taking to the city?”

“Three,” Bilbo had replied, truthfully. “Though they are not slaves, any more. I offered them their freedom.”

“And did they take it?”

Bilbo had stared at the floor, and his Grandfather had grunted.

It was enough of an answer. He knew many who had little qualms about worsening the state of their slave’s lives when money ran short, but he had felt too guilty to do such a thing. A bleeding heart, his father had called him, for all that he had never been inclined to the normal friendships of youth; too willing to help any man in need of his aid, but unwilling to share a drink with them afterwards. These three were loyal enough not to want to leave their Master, and for good reason: Bilbo had saved their lives when he had begged his father to buy them in better times, and there was little safety in the life of a freed slave whose former Master did not have the coin to set them up. 

The rest of their household slaves had been sold to other families who could afford them and who had known Bilbo since birth; he’d known they were going to households that would keep them well and treat them fairly. The land slaves had been sold to the new owners along with the house and the olive groves., but he hadn’t bothered to ask if anyone would take the remaining three. 

Mine slaves, people muttered. Dangerous, and useless: that was why they had been put down there in the first place.

And so they’d left the land of his birth on the back of a cart headed to the city, the bulk of his possessions gone and the only family left to him three displaced slaves unwilling to abandon him; one had rested a hand on his shoulder in comfort, the second had taken the reigns, the third had whistled a tune as the sun had risen higher overhead.

They'd gone to Athens, they'd opened up the house again, and they'd done the best that they could. 

And if his parents could see him now; five years in Athens had certainly changed him. Five, long years since he had seen the groves he had wandered through as a child, since he had walked the roads lined with the grave markers of family who had died long before he was born and austerity had stripped the need for gleaming marble from them. His mother had been buried next to his father, with just a block of local limestone carved with a bird above her, and coins on her eyes. An old tradition, but they stuck with the archaic ways in the country, and he’d placed them on her himself.

She’d believed in the ferryman, in coins to pay her way across the rivers of death to fields of gold and silver; she’d believed that the Gods on their mountaintops saw the smoke of her sacrifices and tasted the wine she’d poured into the earth.

He wasn’t sure he did, anymore.

They had hoped to make things better in Athens, and yet better they had not become: his mother’s friend had proved elusive and vague in answering Bilbo’s letters, and after the first year he had given up. He’d found work, for a time, teaching letters to the children of citizens unable to afford a proper educator, and it was enough to keep them in relative comfort, though not enough to do more than chip slowly away at the debts left to him.

The war ended, and a peace was agreed on, but it didn’t bring back the dead. More and more families found themselves on the streets, unable to rely fathers and sons lost on the battlefield to provide for them, and soon their small house of four became five. Had he been able to afford it, it would have grown further; there were many in need.

Then the city had come knocking with their politely worded ultimatum.

The deadline for the full repayment of his debts was growing closer, and the paltry coin they'd been saving, kept hidden under the floorboards, would not meet the total of what was left, even after the past five years and the money his grandfather had refused. He'd not thought that such a thing would happen, that they would give him a choice of repayment within a year or disenfranchisement, but there it was. The city was calling in its loans, and since he had not done military service, they reasoned that he would be first on the list. 

Even with the work they had, they would not be able to accumulate enough. It had been many years since he had last tried to steal anything, but desperate times called for desperate measures. Filching handfuls of olives from under the noses of his family slaves was not so different from quickly cutting a purse, he reasoned despite knowing that he was lying to himself. and he had practised at home until they were sure he could do it quickly and cleanly. The day before had been a success, the last few men separated from his coin before he had even noticed Bilbo’s presence, but that did not stop the nerves coiling unpleasantly in his stomach as he watched the crowds, searching for a suitable target.

Not anyone who was obviously citizen, he knew. The punishment for targeting them would have been more severe than for anyone else. Nor anyone of an obvious aristocratic background; for all that the rewards might have been more lucrative it was still too much of a risk, and they tended to wander in small groups, making it much harder. 

Nor a slave running an errand for their Master, or anyone who was obviously in need of their coin. He slept fitfully enough as it was, and the thought of anyone going without a meal or being flogged for  _his_ crime was more than his conscience could bear. 

Foreigners, then. The merchants watched their belts closely, but many resident foreigners dressed with more ostentation than true Athenians; only yesterday he had snatched up a pin that one tucked loosely into their clothes, and it had fetched a pretty reward when he had sold it. 

There. 

One man, a little taller and broader than those around him; he wore Hellenic dress, but his skin marked him out as something Other. Too dark for a true Athenian, he thought as he slipped out from behind the colonnade, perhaps from the Persian lands across the Aegean or from somewhere further south still. He looked distracted and irritated as he strode through the crowd, and with hindsight perhaps that annoyance should have been a warning, but at the time he had simply looked preoccupied, less likely to notice the quick, light hands of a thief. 

His hair was dark, almost to his shoulders and pushed back from his face; Bilbo kept a careful eye on him as he cut through the crowds, thankful for his slight stature compared to most Athenians. He lacked the broad grace of the trained athletes and those wealthy enough to do little but train, but it served him well now as he slipped through the press of people, moving closer. 

He had to pick up his pace as the man approached the edge of the market place, not wanting to lose him; he drew close as the man drew level with a narrow, winding road, curving away from the square. If he darted down there, he would be out of sight within seconds. 

There was the man's coin purse, heavy and hanging low enough that it would be easy to cut quickly. 

Sweat beaded on the back of Bilbo's neck, down the line of his spine.

The man's shoulder's were tense; he ran a hand through his hair impatiently, as if deep in thought. 

He pulled the small, curved blade from where he had hidden it and tucked it into the palm of his hand, ready. 

Close, now, and then close  _enough,_ just as they came to the mouth of the alleyway, and he reached, and-

Then a hand was around his throat, the man half-turning with a sudden speed at the slightest pressure, and he was pulled into the narrow street. 

He had just enough time to swear in his head before he was out of sight of the market place and was pressed against a wall, the hand releasing only long enough for an arm to pin him across his throat, restricting his breathing as his back hit the cool stone wall. 

Bilbo swallowed convulsively against the pressure, the knife falling uselessly from his hand as his feet struggled for purchase as he was lifted, just a little, from the ground. 

The man’s face might have been pleasant had it not been frowning so harshly, glaring down at him and tight with anger.

“You’re a stupid thief, to target me.”

His voice was low, pitched quietly to not attract attention.

Bilbo swallowed. The man was not wrong. 

The man continued to glare down and him, tall and intimidating, his scowl deeply unimpressed.

His tone, despite his obvious anger, was collected and cold, the kind of calm that scared Bilbo more than rage would have; it was the voice of a man who was not afraid of inflicting violence. 

He had misjudged his target, and it was unlikely that he would manage to escape without some severe punishment.

“Not poorly kept, for a slave,” the man said as he took a moment to look at Bilbo properly, his lip curling distastefully.

His eyes were a startling and unexpected blue, pinning him as effectively as he arm and the hand fisted in his clothes. 

The fear had Bilbo responding before he could quite stop himself, his words tumbling out with more confidence than he himself was feeling. 

“I’m not a slave,” he said, his voice hoarse against the pressure against his throat. “I was born a citizen, and I’ll die a citizen, and I would thank _you_ to remember it.”

The man’s eyes widened, fractionally, and Bilbo found himself immediately regretting his words and their acerbic tone, entirely the _wrong_ attitude to take towards a man who had just caught you trying to steal from them. It seemed rather likely that he _would_ die a citizen at this rate, at this man's hand before he’d even had a chance to have the citizenship he was bragging of taken from him.

His head began to swim as the man continued to stare at him, his breathing short.

They stared at each other for a long, slow moment, and then something sudden flickered in the man's gaze, some thought that had him relaxing his arm a little, pulling back slightly. 

“You’re barely worth the effort,” the man said then, and all of a sudden the arm across his throat was gone and the hand pinning him against the wall released.

Bilbo almost stumbled into the man’s chest with the suddenness of it, but he had already taken a step back, turning away from him.

He rubbed at his throat, taking deep, long breaths despite the soreness of his throat, and by the time he had thought to say something the man had already disappeared back into the market place, long gone. 

Bilbo he slid, slowly, down the wall to the ground, his head back against the stone.

Then he grabbed his knife and too was gone, down the alleyway in the opposite direction, before the man changed his mind and returned. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go again...
> 
> Want to say hello, or have any questions? northerntrash.tumblr.com


	2. Chapter 2

Thorin pushed his way through the crowds at the edge of the market place, more determined than ever to leave the press of bodies and the busy heat of the day. His mood had been bad before his attention had been caught by the careful hand of a petty thief – as if he could spend most of his days down by the port and not be used to noticing the feeling of someone’s eyes following you appraisingly. The thief had been quite good, compared to some of the more desperate types you found on the outskirts of the city, but Thorin was more than used to dealing with criminals.

And, there, he was out, into the quieter streets where he could hear himself think, the narrow passages between houses casting enough shade to keep the worst of the afternoon sun off him. He sighed, his hand rubbing at his upper arm.

People looked at him oddly if he complained at the heat, as if his darker skin meant that he was somehow immune to it.

He always had to bite back telling them that he had been born _here,_ in Athens, when they did that.

The day had started off well enough – the latest shipment had come in on time and in good order, his most reliable trader delivering once again, and he’d left the unpacking of the goods to the fifty oarsmen who had rowed it across the Aegean from the shores of what had once been Phoenicia before the might of the Persian Empire had conquered it some century earlier; it was a land as alien and strange to most Athenians as Thorin was himself.

They might look at him askance, but he never had any trouble selling the purple dyes his traders brought, the gold melted down and recast into objects to decorate their wives dressing tables, the catches his fishermen brought in every day.

It was all well to _buy_ from a foreigner; to treat him as an equal rather than some strange novelty was quite another.

If he had been a different kind of man he might have smiled, wryly; as it was he simply clenched his fists at his side and picked up his pace.

“Metic,” he remembered his father telling him, when he had asked what it meant as a boy, before years of hardship and battle had taken their toll on the old man’s mind, ‘Metic means that our family have lived here for a hundred years, but that we’ll still never be _them._ Metic means that we can pay their taxes and we can fight their wars against the men we are descended from, but that we’ll still be _foreigners,_ that we’ll always be their slaves in their heads, if not in ours.”

Thorin hadn’t known what to say to that at the time: he supposed, now he looked back on it, that there was very little that he could have said.

It was true, after all.

And today had, once more, only reaffirmed what he had known since he was a child and had first been told that he could no longer race with the other boys that lived near him.

The city needed money: years of war had taken their toll, and the lavish building projects that the elders of the city kept agreeing to needed paying for. The Persians, when they had invaded Athens thirty-five years earlier, had destroyed the sacred buildings that had stood there since Thorin’s great-Grandfather had first come to the city. They’d been ruins for as long as Thorin could remember, and now they were rebuilding, and now they needed his help.

“A financial contribution,” one had said to him, with an insincere, half-smile. “You can afford it, of course.”

It had been there, unspoken: your money is good enough, even if you aren’t.

And Thorin had agreed, of course, because there was no way that he could avoid it without invoking the ire of the Assembly. He had suspected such a demand, politely phrased as a request, when he had first received the invitation the day before, but it didn’t do much to stop the irritation.

The thief had only tested his patience further, and the cold anger he’d felt when he man had informed him with the arrogance of someone _born_ to their rights that he was a citizen had only made it worse: Thorin had fought for his city, had worked for his city, and he had never broken its laws, yet here was some criminal with more rights under the law than he had.

But he had let him go, because his position was tenuous enough at best, his presence tolerated rather than accepted: letting out his anger on a citizen (even he had been ready to cut Thorin’s purse from his belt) would not have won him any favours, and it was possible he could have even been prosecuted for it. It had been a hard test of his rage to release his grip on the man, but he had managed, turning away before he could change his mind and let his temper get the better of him.

It wasn't entirely his fault, he tried to reason with himself. There were children starving and families dying in the poverty war had left. Athens was not what it had once been. 

For what a pathetic state the old men in the Assembly had gotten his city into in the last decade, that citizens were reduced to stealing in the street? For it _was_ Thorin’s city, no matter how often others denied it. He had been born here, and with the good grace of the Gods, he would die here, to be buried in the cemetery by the main gate into the city alongside his father and grand-father.

He _loved_ her, her gleaming marble and the curses of the men at the port, the rank heat of her in the summer and the breeze from the sea as he watched his boats sail away; he loved her for her filth and her beauty and the nobility built into every stone, for the echo of his footsteps in the narrow streets at night and the black smoke pluming in the air when sacrifices were burnt for the Goddess. She was the only woman he would ever love but for his sister, this city, and so when they twisted his arm for the coin to keep her strong and beautiful he would never be able to turn them away, for all that it fuelled the constant embers of anger in his chest to be treated that way.

He took long, steady breaths as the entrance to his sprawling home came into view, and he slipped through the opening to the courtyard beyond, trying to calm himself a little before he inflicted his poor mood on his family.

And there was Kili’s bow, propped up against one wall, and he could hear Dis’ voice through a window from inside; the columns cast long lines of shadow across the ground now that the sun was starting to make its downward turn, and grain had been recently poured across the altar in thanks for something.  The courtyard was warm, but not as unpleasantly so as the busy market place, the cool darkness of the rooms that lead off it calling to him as he followed that draw inside.

As if their status as resident foreigners didn’t set them apart enough, the unusual set up of their family home caused many a raised eyebrow to any who heard of it. Thorin’s mother had been a slave freed by their father, and she had had no time for the strict segregation of women that the Greeks practised, where even within their own homes they were kept to their own rooms, rarely interacting with the men of their house. His sister had been raised likewise, and since she had remained in the house even after she married (much to Thorin’s secret happiness, for the sake of her company and that of her husband and sons) she still could be found in the rooms normally reserved for men.

There was Frerin, stretched out on a sofa, asleep, his dark hair spread across a cushion and one hand thrown up to his face: he spent many hours in the day dozing since they had returned from war, and for a moment Thorin considered waking him, before deciding against it. Frerin had never said anything, but he suspected that his brother slept poorly these days.

As he himself did, many nights.

The white bandage wound around his brother’s face seemed at stark odds with the shadowed room and their family’s dark skin; Thorin frowned at the red tendril of scar tissue just visible on either side of it, before shaking his head and moving through to the next room.

One nephew and brother had arrived home; Thorin checked them off on the mental list he had found himself maintaining since his father had passed away and he had been left as the head of his family; Dis smiled at him as he came to her next, and she dismissed the servant she had been talking to with a warm nod.

There again was another problem with their family: Thorin was uncomfortable with slaves, being the son and great-grandson of freed ones. All in his household were given their freedom, and paid for their services; anything else seemed almost painfully hypocritical to him.

“Vili, Fili?” he asked, as she took a seat on the chair next to her loom.

“Still down at the port,” she replied. “You’re home early.”

He did not answer her implied question, just ran a hand through his hair and settled down on the sofa opposite.

Dis had always been shrewd: it was a shame, he often thought, that women had not been given the same rights as men. She would have been a fierce business partner.

“They wanted more coin, then?” she asked, and he huffed a quiet, unamused laugh.

“As always.”

The quiet sound of her loom began as she started to weave, a gentle, familiar noise, and Thorin closed his eyes, leaning back against the wall.

“And what else?”

“Someone tried to cut my purse on the way back here.”

She laughed, a sweet sound in the dim room.

“I suppose that ‘try’ is the important word there.”

He made an amused noise of acknowledgement. “Balin, Dwalin?”

“Balin returned an hour or so ago: he is in his study. Dwalin said he would return with the other two and your new ward, in time for dinner. You didn’t do anything stupid to the thief, did you?”

Thorin snorted. “Do you take me for a fool?”

He opened one eye just in time to see her glance over at him, with a raised eyebrow, and he found a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth despite himself.

“You don’t want me to answer that, Thorin.”

And this was why he would never make his family change, no matter how difficult it could be dealing with those who thought they knew better about how a family should be run: because regardless of his day, of how poor a mood he was in, walking into that courtyard, knowing his siblings and nephews and cousins were around him, never failed to lift just a little of the weight off his shoulders.

“Dinner is in two hours or so,” she said, idly. “I don’t suppose there is any chance that you could relax until then?”

With a groan he sat straight again, rubbing at the familiar ache in his arm, but before he could reply his brother appeared in the doorway, one hand tugging at the bandage across his face, pulling the fabric away from the still-red scar tissue that bisected one eye.

“Everything delivered,” he said, stifling a yawn. “Vili’s sorting out the surplus. I’ve got the new orders for you here.”

He passed Thorin a thick bundle of parchment, and with a sigh Thorin got to his feet.

“Unfortunately not,” he answered Dis, before placing a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

Frerin smiled, the same wide-toothed grin he had had since he was a boy, as he had pulled some trick that Thorin would soon become a victim to.

He could have asked Frerin to deal with the paperwork – he often had, in other years – but recently he had shied away from reading and writing, and Thorin couldn’t bring himself to push. He had not failed to notice the fact that his brother had not ventured into their library since they had returned home, much as the dark shadow underneath his one visible eye had not been missed, either. Thorin left his siblings as he made his way to said library, which also doubled as his office.

Though the courtyard was open to the street during the day, it was constantly busy with family and servants, and it was near impossible for someone to enter without being noticed. So Thorin was quite impressed at the fact that he was able to suppress his jump of surprise when he opened the door to find another person in there, lounging comfortably on the chair on the other side of the long table that he used as a desk.

There was a long, slow pause as the man smiled at him, seemingly perfectly content.

Then, Thorin sighed.

“Gandalf,” he said, and once more rubbed at his forehead, though this time more to suppress what he suspected would become a rather painful headache.

“It is good to see you, Thorin,” his patron replied, beaming beatifically as Thorin took his own chair.

“It is more normal to ask to enter a man’s house, you know.”

Gandalf simply shrugged, his expression not faltering.

Thorin might have been more annoyed, particularly considering the long day that he had had, but he owed the man too much to really hold it against him. Not only were resident foreigners in the city unable to vote or marry citizens, they were also unable to purchase property, or even to continue living in the city without the support of a patron, and Gandalf had been their family’s since before Thorin had even been born. This house, which Thorin had been born in, had been purchased by the old man when Thorin’s grandfather had still been alive, and given to them as a gift, and he had long supported their right to remain in the city, never interfering in their business or demanding a cut of their profits, as other patrons were wont to do.

In fact, Gandalf was often completely the opposite: not four years ago he had disappeared completely for near a year, and it was not the first time he had done so. When asked about where he had gone, he had only smiled, and shrugged, and said no more.

“What do you want, Gandalf? It is not often you appear, and it is never without cause.”

Gandalf laughed, running a hand through his grey-white beard.

“It is true, my friend, that I have not seen you as often as I could in recent years. I certainly attended your father more, but… well.”

He said no more, and Thorin did not ask: neither Gandalf nor Thrain had ever explained under what circumstances they had met, nor what had prompted them to start such an unlikely friendship. All Thorin knew was that it had been at a point when his father had been in dire need – no more had ever been offered.

He did not have to wait long for Gandalf to continue.

“If anything should ever happen to me, Thorin, you will need to act quickly.”

Thorin glanced up from the papers that he had started to read whilst he had been waiting for his friend to continue, a little surprised by this unexpected opening. He had thought perhaps that Gandalf might have been here to offer business advice, or news, not... this.

“What do you mean?”

From the folds of his clothing, Gandalf pulled out a folded piece of paper, thick and tied, sealed with Gandalf’s own mark. He turned it over slowly in his hands.

“You would need a new sponsor with the utmost haste.”

Thorin stared, leaning back in his seat a little, a frown pulling his forehead.

“They normally allow some time for a metic to acquire a new patron should theirs die without an heir to continue the sponsorship,” he replied, slowly.

Gandalf smiled, a small, odd smile, and his eyes dragged slowly across the bookshelves that lined one wall of the room, glancing over the texts crammed into them.

“Normally, yes. But your family is not normal.”

There was a slow certainty to his voice that said that it was not an insult but a compliment, this comment, though not phrased in the most conventional of ways. Thorin was long used to Gandalf by now, and so paid no attention to it, and simply continued to watch him carefully, his expression hidden underneath a long-perfected mask. Gandalf waited a moment, to see if Thorin would protest, and when he didn’t amusement twinkled for a moment in his eyes, before he turned serious once more.

“Do you know that yours is the wealthiest family in Athens, Thorin?”

His reply was ever so slightly hesitant, but only those who knew him particularly well would have been able to tell. “The wealthiest metic family, yes.”

Gandalf shook his head. “No; not anymore. Your business ventures have been remarkably successful, and in recent years, those of our most prestigious families have been less than. There is a reason they return again and again to ask you for coin, a reason they ask for more from you than from any other family. It is because they know you can afford it, and they resent the fact that they cannot.”

Thorin had suspected the latter part of that, but not the first. He glanced to the narrow window for a moment, and the bright courtyard beyond it, before returning his gaze to the man opposite.

“And how do you know that?”

Gandalf’s tone was wry, the corner of his mouth twisting upwards. “There is little in this city that I do not know, my dear boy.”

Thorin snorted.

“That isn’t an answer.”

The older man shrugged, not disputing it but not doing anything to further clarify himself, either. Thorin was well used to this characteristic kind of conversation, but it did not stop it being any less frustrating.

“You must act swiftly.”

Gandalf’s eyes were a dark and unsettling grey: they stared at Thorin with a strange intensity that he was not used to seeing from the man, and he found himself shifting uncomfortably under the weight of it.

“What are you saying?” he managed in the end.

“I am saying, that should anything happen to me, you will need to find a new patron immediately. And it will not be easy. You are in a lucky position that you will not need financial support from a sponsor, but you will struggle to find one nonetheless. You will need to look in places that you... will not expect.”

Gandalf’s words were loaded with intention, but Thorin did not know how to read them: he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was missing something of vital importance, that there was some part of this story that he was unaware of.

“You are being vague again, my friend,” Thorin said, frowning. “I don’t think I have ever known a man to spend so long talking and yet say so little at the same time.”

“Quite,” Gandalf replied, an amused smile pulling at the corners of his mouth.

They sat in silence for a moment, both carefully watching each other.

“Here,” Gandalf said eventually, his voice low now, as if he were worried about someone overhearing him: he passed Thorin the parchments that he still held with a only a moment’s hesitation, but enough of one that Thorin still noticed.

“On the back is an address: the minute you hear anything, go to that man, and give him this letter. He is an old friend, and he will be of great service to you. I have known from birth, and I knew his mother for a time:  there is no deceit in him, and he knows nothing of those that work against you and your family. That, I can swear to you.”

Thorin knew roughly where the house was, he thought; certainly not too far away within the city, in one of the older districts that was becoming a little shabby now. He sighed, and stood, pulling out a hollow book and placing the parchment inside. His back now to Gandalf, he resisted the urge to close his eyes and rest his head against a shelf.

“Are you expecting to die soon, Gandalf? If you are not then I hardly think that this matters, and if you are then I would have thought that you had better things to do than to riddle with me.”

His voice was perhaps a little harder than it should have been, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to care. It had been a long day, and he was not prepared to play tricks with an old philosopher who he knew would not answer any question that he posed straightforwardly, no matter how much Thorin pressed.

“Death is always an unexpected door, Thorin, and we cannot evade it forever.”

Thorin huffed a quiet, exasperated laugh.

“Why are you telling me this?”

Gandalf’s head tipped back, and he looked up at the ceiling: when Thorin turned back he saw that he was frowning slightly, the corners of his mouth pinched. When he heard Thorin shift he looked back at him, and his cheeks hollowed a little as seemed to take a deep breath.

“I’ve never told you why I’ve supported your family for so long, have I?”

That was not what he had thought to hear: Thorin took his seat again as he shook his head.

Gandalf’s head turned to one side slightly.

“It is because I believe in you, in all of you. And I always have. Your family has weathered many storms, and it will continue to do so, because you are stronger than even you truly know. And I have always known that soon enough Athens would need that strength: they would need you.”

He tapped his fingers together, and Thorin watched him for any signs of what he was thinking as the old man stared out of the window for a moment.

“That time is coming,” he continued, his voice still low. “And should you hear your city crying, should you see it beginning to burn, would you answer the call?”

Thorin did not need to think before he replied.

“I would.”

Gandalf nodded, and he did not seem surprised.

“I know. Your father was the same. And that is why I have sponsored you for so many years, despite the opposition that I have faced for that support. Because we need you, and there will come a time when you will have to risk everything to meet that need. But when you do, should you succeed, you will get everything that is owed to you. On that, I can assure you.”

Then the old man got to his feet, nodding at Thorin, one hand rubbing briefly at the puckered scars on his arm. Thorin felt none the wiser to what was happening than he had when he had first opened the door to see Gandalf, but he was starting to suspect that he would not be getting an explanation today.

“That is a tall thing to promise, Gandalf. Can you see the future, now?”

Then Gandalf was smiling again, the warm, amused smile that Thorin had seen so often appearing on his face seamlessly; it was as much a mask, Thorin realised all of a sudden, than his own blank seriousness. He had spent his whole life thinking that Gandalf was always laughing just a little at someone’s expense, but he saw now that it wasn't the case. His smile hid his fears, and his doubts, and his worries just as much as Thorin’s frown hid his own.  

“Only the Gods know what will come to be, old friend, and even then, not always.”

Perhaps it was that revelation, that Gandalf's smile hid something that could have been fear, that really made up his mind; perhaps it was the strangeness of the conversation, he really wasn’t sure. But as Gandalf reached the door Thorin found himself slumping back in his chair, one hand rubbing slow circles at his temple once more.

“I will do as you ask,” Thorin answered, in the end. “For all that I don’t like making promises when there is much to the tale that you refuse to tell me.”

And with a smile and a nod Gandalf was gone, leaving Thorin alone with his work, and more questions than answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who's a spoilt author? I am! http://drakyrna-art.tumblr.com/post/95708182960/aaaaahhhh-new-fic-called-achoros-by
> 
> Thank you so much, this is absolutely wonderful. (fyi, the Thorin in this is EXACTLY how I pictured him, down to his unimpressed expression; the hair is in particular is perfect and I'm crying. And look how cute Bilbo is?)
> 
> As always, you can find me on tumblr: northerntrash.tumblr.com


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive errors! I am currently in the middle of editing my MA dissertation, and the thought of editing anything else makes me want to cry. Please also forgive that I haven't replied to any of your reviews - RL is taking it out of me at the moment, but I have read (and grossly sobbed in joy) over every one of them. Thank you so much!

The streets were dark as Bilbo approached his home, less than a week after his unfortunate encounter with the man in the market place. He still had not quite managed to return there since he had been caught in the act, though the ache of his shoulder where it had jarred against the wall had not faded for quite some time. He hadn’t tried to cut another purse nor to pick up any more jewellery, and he wished that he could say that the sudden decline in his less-than-legal activities was down to a rise in his other work: unfortunately he knew full well that it was little more than cowardice.

He could have gone back. The truth was, he didn’t want to.

Bilbo was well aware that he had been lucky in his escape: there was very little tolerance for petty theft in the city, particularly when times were as hard in the city as they were now. He had been lucky to escape with all his fingers – he wouldn’t have been the first thief to have lost a finger to the quick knife of a victim who had caught them in the act, and more than one body had been found with its throat slit outside the city walls in recent months. His hands had still been shaking by the time he had got back home, his face so pale that the moment he had walked in on his household sat around the kitchen table they had known that something had gone wrong.

Three pairs of arms had wrapped around his shoulders, and a fourth around his middle, the comfortable weight of them slowly easing the fear and tension out of his body. It had taken Bilbo some time to become used to their tactile nature, too used to the affectionate but regularly unbroken distance between him and his parents. Now, though he found himself sinking into those arms that had sought to comfort him. Bifur had run comforting hands up and down the length of his arms several times after they had pulled back from him, as if assuring both himself and Bilbo that their former-Master and friend was still there with them, his thickly scarred fingertips running over the lines of his hands, as if in thanks that they were still intact.

Bilbo himself still had a difficult time believing that he had escaped so freely: he had expected the worst when the other man had pressed him up against the wall, a fear sudden in coming and overwhelming him when it did, but nothing had happened – perhaps it had been the knowledge that Bilbo was a citizen, perhaps the man himself had simply not been as violent as Bilbo had first thought. He still hadn’t quite worked out what that flicker in those oddly blue eyes had meant.

He still sometimes felt the ghost of that arm across his throat, pinning him against the wall; more than once in the past few days he had woken up short of breath, his fingers scrabbling at a phantom arm, those furious eyes watching him closely.

And whether it was cowardice or concern that motivated him, or a well-thought out combination of both, Bilbo did not dare try his hand at theft again.

A short-lived career as a thief, Bilbo was quite sure, was a lot better than a short-lived _life._

That knowledge did little to help their remaining financial problems, and he had done his best in the last few days to drum up as much teaching work as possible, though the need for his services was in decline now that families were in greater need of wages that their children could bring in, whether it was within a family business or from whatever odd jobs they could scrounge down by the port. There were still enough that wanted their sons educated in basic letters to bring in a trickle of coin, but he was becoming increasingly aware that the deadline for his debts was growing closer, and that it would not be enough.

There was little he could do, bar praying to the Gods for some unprecedented help, and he still did, though he was not entirely convinced anymore that anyone was listening anymore.

But the day was done, the sun was nearly set, and there was little more that he could do today.

He took a long, deep breath, trying to calm the buzzing ache of anxiety that had had been present in his body for what felt like _years_ now, the twisting pain of fear in his chest.

Bilbo tried to take comfort in the familiar echo of the narrow street. He knew each stone in the walls, the way each shadow fell; he knew the sounds of the families pressed close together in these shabby houses and the potholes in the road, the small weeds growing up in the gutters running along the pavements. But no matter how hard he tried he was unable to: he tried instead to remember the sound that his feet had made in the sun-cracked dirt road outside the house he had grown up in, as he walked home from a day spent reading in the shade of the olive trees in the grove; the bitter-hot smell of a summer day under those leaves, the colour of the laurels stretching up the side of the house. He closed his eyes, for just a moment, trying to picture the bright blue sky stretching over miles of twisting trees, over shrub and dry grass, over fields and pastures, the white-yellow sun bleeding into orange as it sunk lower in the sky and the shadows turned to purples and greys.

But the streets remained lined with tall walls and the stench of waste, the cries of children being put to bed; his feet padded over cracked stone and the pools of light from the firelight pouring from the few un-shuttered windows.

A familiar figure, propped against the still-open gateway to the cramped courtyard of their home, came into view, and it was the sight of him that managed to bring just a little of the comfort that he had been searching for. Bofur’s face stretched into a lined, tired smile as he caught sight of Bilbo, unfolding his body to straighten up, reaching for the catch behind him, ready to pull the door shut and secure the house for the night.

“Nice night for it,” he commented, his voice amused and warm as Bilbo reached him. The smaller man nodded in return, rubbing the heel of his hand across his forehead.

“You don’t have to wait for me every day, you know,” he said, the same thing he said every night to his old friend. It would not have been the first time he tried to assure Bofur that he no longer was expected to continue the duties he had had before, and no doubt it would not be the last.

Bofur just shrugged, the line of his broad shoulders faint in the dark, as he always did in reply.

Though slaves still in name, since the three kinsmen had refused their freedom, Bilbo was resolute in not treating them as though they were. Had things been better, he would have refused their contributions to the household entirely, so they could have built up savings of their own, but he was well aware that he was too desperate to turn down what was offered, and there was a certain solidarity in a shared problem that his father had never understood.

Trying to stop them had proved impossible time and time again, and over the years since they had moved to Athens, Bilbo had come to understand that they did not act in the way they did out of any sense of lingering obligation, but instead because they truly wished to. Bofur had shadowed Bilbo when he was just a boy, making sure he didn’t get himself into any trouble, and his presence was as comforting and familiar as his own father’s had been by the time they had left the countryside for the city; in the days when he had had nothing to do but idle his days away in ease, Bofur had been good company, always able to lift his spirits and join him in a song. Bofur waiting for him at the end of the day was the last remnants of these old habits, long abandoned for necessity in the city, and though he knew that he could have insisted had he truly wanted, he found an odd comfort in the sight of him waiting, and so never had.

In an odd way, he thought that it might have been just as comforting to Bofur, as it was to him.

When Bilbo had first seen Bofur and his kin, he had thought them the largest men he had ever seen, broad and tall and built with the thick, strong muscle characteristic of mining slaves, who spent their days engaging with hard, physical labour; they were ridged with scars from the dangerous work, the lines on their face creased with the black soot and oil from the lamps in the mines, callused and intimidating and dangerous looking. Even now, as Bofur pulled the heavy door across the gate, the strength of the muscles of his back and arms was evident, perhaps a little softer after years out of the mines, but noticeable none the less.   

“Everyone home?” Bilbo asked, though he knew well that Bofur would not be closing the gate were they not.

Bofur nodded, making a low noise of agreement as he slid the bolts home.

“Bombur’s waiting up to make you something to eat. Bifur and the young one are in bed already, he’s been getting headaches again.”

Bilbo nodded absently as he followed the smell of cooking inside, to find a warm bowl and a roll of bread already set out for him on the kitchen table.

A mine collapse had left Bifur with a broad scar bisecting his forehead, and long dizzy spells. His grasp of the Greek language – only rudimentary at best – had been lost entirely, leaving only his native tongue, and he was prone to blinding headaches.

Bombur shook his head with a wry look at the dark sky outside as he filled Bilbo’s bowl, and he smiled tiredly in response as he tucked in.

Broader still than either Bofur or Bifur, Bombur was the kind of man that others looked to in fear, intimidated by his sheer size and the obvious power in his build, but Bilbo had never even heard the man raise his voice in anger, let alone his fists. The three of them were quite possibly the most gentle men he had ever known, including members of his own family who had presumed that a level of gentility meant that they could go without kindness. More than often he had had to fight back repulsion when he heard other citizens dismissively discussing slaves, talking with a curled lip about the innate barbarism of them, their brutish nature.

Anyone who thought that had clearly never seen Bifur petting the ears of stray cats with his scarred, weathered hands, as gentle as if he were cradling the finest terracotta. They’d never watched him play a lyre, deft and sure, plucking tunes so fine from the strings that more than once they had reduced people to tears. They’d never heard the story of the time one of the young boys working in the groves had fallen into a thicket hiding a nest of vipers, and Bombur had walked straight in without being able to tell where the snakes were, to lift the bitten boy, already going limp from the poison, to safety. They hadn’t sat outside the windows of the slaves’ quarters and listened to the stories he told the young ones, to help them get to sleep. They didn’t remember the pain of a twisted ankle, only for it to be soothed by the comfort of arms carrying him home.

They’d never lain by a campfire in the cooling night and listened to Bofur singing in his native tongue, the soft syllables curling in a warm evening like smoke, making a paltry campfire feel as comforting as the bright glow of a hearth.

They’d never known their slaves properly, if at all, if they thought that was all there was to them.

The kitchen was warm and the dinner had filled him; sleep began to creep over him as he listened to the low crackle of the logs in the hearth. Bofur poured a little more water into his cup as he saw Bilbo’s eyes begin to droop, weakening his wine down further, and Bombur ran soothing fingers through the dusty mess of Bilbo’s curls, the pads of his fingers scraping gently against his scalp, an absentminded gesture, fond and full of care.

Bofur’s shoulder pressed against his, Bombur a solid presence behind him; there was a weight to their presence, comforting and familiar in the room.

“We’ll be alright,” Bombur told him, as if he could read his mind. “Something’ll come up.”

 

\--

 

He could not have told you what had woken him; it certainly wasn’t the quite voices on the street outside, nor the gentle metallic clink of armour, but now that he was awake it was impossible not to hear them. He might be old, his body frailer than it had been in quite some years, but there was nothing at all wrong with his ears.

And wasn’t that the curse of a long life, he thought to himself as he sat up in the bed, the heavy weight of a familiar body at his side. You spend so many years assuming that you know what you are doing and where you are going, only to discover at the last moment that you knew nothing all along, right when you weren’t able to do anything about it. He ran a tired hand through his hair, steel-grey now for far too many years, and sighed.

The sounds were growing closer, but he did not rush.

Several people had begged him to run, had pleaded with him to escape the city before a night like this had come, but it was not in his nature to flee. Even when he was just a boy, pushed to war, he hadn’t been able to do anything but stand as fear had hit him, watching the sprawling mass of an enemy he didn’t even understand pour across the battlefield towards him.

The phantom ache of old injuries wormed their way through the flesh of his arm for a moment, before he stretched it out, and they subsided.

But it did not do to dwell on the past, and nor on what could not be changed. Instead, he reached out, and ran a gentle finger across the soft curve of a shoulder. The body next to him shifted slightly, waking, and he made a low noise of comfort.

“They’ve come,” he said, his voice quiet in the dark room. “Stay in bed.”

No answer came; they had shared their farewells weeks before, when he had first realised that there was no way to change the course of what was to come. But a hand did catch his, bringing it close to press a kiss against the skin of his palm, drier and softer with age than it had ever been before.

It was tempting to stay in this familiar warmth, to cradle the body next to him and let them come and find him, but instead he pulled away, into the cooler air of the room, and dressed himself. He didn’t want to be dragged from his bed like a criminal, didn’t want to be pulled kicking and screaming from his room and his house, his dignity stripped away in all of a moment. He would walk out of his house with his head held high, with his shoulders straight, with the smile that he had worn like armour for more years that he could even count, now.

A quiet knock came at his door, along with a low word from the freedman who had been on watch at the gate that night, telling him nothing more than he had known himself. He still thanked him, and told him that he would be down soon.

In a cupboard, where was it – ah, there.

He felt a little more like himself as he strapped his blade to his belt, the odd curve of the Persian steel a comfortable weight as it had ever been. A little inflammatory, perhaps, to wear such a thing where he was going, but it had been with him a great many years, and he wasn’t about to leave it behind now. And there, his walking stick, a strong piece of tempered ash to support him, because he rather suspected that he might need it.

“Very well,” he said to himself, wondering if he had time for a pipe before deciding against it. “Into the fray, old boy, as you’ve done a thousand times before.”

The certain stillness in the bed let him know that its occupant was no more asleep than he was, but he wasn’t sure if those words were really for them, or for him.

His house was dark, only the embers from dying fires lighting the way. He ran a fond hand along one wall, as the noise from outside grew a little louder. He’d kept the shutters on his windows open, of late, despite the drafts and the noises from outside, and now he could hear them approach, at least eight, he thought, more than enough for an old man like him.

It was oddly gratifying, that they’d decided he was dangerous enough to warrant that many men.

The same freedman who had knocked on his door was propped up against the gate that barred the way between the courtyard and the street, looking relaxed but for the odd stillness about him that betrayed his tension as he listened through the heavy wood to the now audible sounds from the street outside.

He raised an eyebrow at the approach of his former master.

“Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

The freedman opened the gate for him, and he took a step forward, brushing a hand across his old friend’s shoulder briefly. He wondered for a moment if the dim light from the house might halo him in the darkness, might shine through the silver of his hair and the folds of his fabric and make him appear somehow other, as if he were something more than mortal, more than human.

But it didn’t, it wouldn’t; the light was too dim, only just bright enough to catch the steel of the already-unsheathed blades outside, and he was just a man.

“You are here for me, I assume,” he said, not quite stepping out of the gateway itself.

“We are,” came the reply from one man, just as another looked at the ground. He knew these men, had trained some of them himself, and he wondered for a moment if they had selected these men deliberately, picked faces that he knew it would hurt to see standing outside his house with their swords drawn.

“I am sorry,” the man closest to him said, and he did sound genuinely regretful.

Gandalf straightened a little, his eyebrows rising.

“Why my dear boy,” he replied, his voice almost amused. “I know full well you are. But that doesn’t make what you are doing any better, you know.”

The other man made a low noise, as if startled by that reply, and Gandalf seemed to smile a little, though it was hard to tell in the dark quite what his expression really was. He took one slow, deliberate step out of the house, and into the street, out of the safety and warmth of a home that he had known his entire life, and that he might never see again.

“You are a little foolish, you know, if you come expecting redemption from the likes of me.”

No more was said; Gandalf shut the gate behind him, giving one last, affectionate nod to the friend who waited to lock it once he had gone. The street was darker now, the light from inside cut off. He couldn’t make out their eyes through their helmets, not properly.

It was almost amusing, that they were wearing helmets. What trouble were they expecting from him?

Then there was a heavy sigh, the quiet movements of footsteps in the street, and the sound of steel being sheathed.

A figure opened the shutters of a bedroom window a crack, to see what was going on, but by that point the street was already empty, the press of soldiers and the stooped, old man gone.

They waited a moment, perhaps to see if anything else was going to happen, before shutting the window again, and returning to their sleep.

And the night drew on, two other men who might never have met but for the events of that quiet, midnight hour restlessly sleeping, unaware of the news that the new day would bring; above them all the Gods might have been laughing, if they really were there, as the pale slice of the moon kept a watchful but indifferent eye over the city of Athens.


	4. Chapter 4

When Thorin woke it was to the bright sunshine of an early morning, a fresh light that shone with a strangely honeyed-green through the old, gnarled fig tree outside the window, the broad leaves casting patterns against the floor. They were different from the ones he had watched when he was a child, the three taller and the leaves new, but it was still somehow the same, despite that, and he had an odd fondness for the tree. It hadn’t given fruit in several years; Dis said that it had something to do with the pruning, that more branches needed to be cut back to allow for new growth, but somehow he’d never gotten around to it.

Tomorrow, he’d told himself for what could have been half a decade now; or the next, if I don’t get around to it.

He didn’t really miss the figs, but he did sometimes wonder if he was making up the smell of the ripening fruit drifting through his open window in some strange fit of childhood nostalgia.

There was the sound of a whetstone against metal outside the window, the distant noise of Balin singing, and the low hum of a city slowly waking, the noise of cartwheels against the flags in the streets, the call of slaves making their way to the market for the day, a child laughing somewhere in the street; slivers of a pale blue sky were visible through the leaves of the tree here and there, the promise of another hot day to come, and for a moment he lay in his bed and watched them move slightly in the breeze that left his room a little cool, for now, but would do nothing later on to help with the stifling heat of the afternoon.

It was with a low groan that he hoisted himself out of the comfort of his bed and into the day proper, dressing before padding down the narrow steps and into the courtyard of his home with the occasional noise of discontent as the ache in his back eased as he stretched – one day he might have to listen to his sister when she lectured him that he was not as young as he used to be.

The familiar pain in his back shifted, just a little, as he rolled his shoulders as he stepped into the heat of the courtyard, already growing in the early sunlight.

Fili was propped up against the wall, in the broad stripe of shade left, his legs stretched out in the sun as he sharpened the short sword that he had been training with for some years now. Thorin could just barely restrain his smile to a quirk at the corner of his mouth at the focused frown on his nephew’s face, the red-blonde hair he’d inherited from his father pulled back in a low knot at the base of his neck. It was worn a little longer to most his age, and Thorin was not entirely convinced that it wasn’t intended to imitate the style in which he himself wore his hair.

“Morning, Fili,” he said after a moment, when it became clear that his nephew was entirely too absorbed in his task to notice the arrival of his Uncle; Fili started a little, and Thorin almost winced as the pad of several of his fingers skimmed across the surface of the blade in surprise, only just avoiding cutting himself.

He gave is Uncle a reproving look, and Thorin shook his head, a little amused despite himself, his hands pulling into loose fists as he rolled his shoulders once more. Fili must have caught the slight wince that let out despite himself, and he eyed Thorin cautiously, not quite daring to ask whether or not he was pain; he had been there when Thorin had sustained his last injury, but he knew better than to press when his Uncle shook his head.

“Where is your brother?” Thorin asked instead, straightening his arms.

“Inside,” Fili replied, turning back to his sword. “Trying to convince Dwalin to spar with him later.”

Thorin snorted, taking half a step closer. “He’ll end up on the flat of his back if he’s not careful. Do you… need a hand?”

Fili glanced up at him, and nodded slowly; whilst they were both aware that the younger man had not needed help with caring for his weaponry or armour in several years (and that most of the time he did so alone quite happily) Thorin was never quite able to shake the habit of offering. Fili had been to war, had fought alongside Thorin and Frerin in the last battles, and yet he couldn’t quite stop himself from asking, still.

Thankfully Fili never turned him down; he wasn’t quite sure if his ego would be able to take it.

Many members of the Athenian citizen body were well used to the sight of Thorin, standing tall and dark and intimidating, as Other as it was possible to be whilst speaking Greek like the native that he was; his harsh temper and impatience left many of them muttering to each other about how _barbarian blood always shows in the end,_ how _you can take them out of those uncultured lands, but you can’t take that uncivilised nature out of them_. Cold and hard, and no doubt this way in every aspect of his life: they might have been a little surprised to see him now, as his back thudded against the wall so he could sink down to the ground against it, shoulder to shoulder with his nephew, pushing his hair back with one hand as he reached for the whetstone with another.

Fili smiled up at him, a man and still a boy at the same time, and the twist at the corner of his mouth grew into a full smile without him quite realising as he pulled the blade from his nephew’s lap and into his own.

The bronze was a familiar weight in his hands, warm to the touch after Fili’s care; he’d oiled it too, and rebound the leather on the handle recently; he still remembered the first time that Frerin had taught him how to wrap the grips on his weapons, before their nephew had even really been old enough to be holding blades.

It had been him that had taught Kili, after Frerin’s patience had given out trying to get him to sit still for more than a few minutes.

Dis had hovered over them both times, glaring down at them, as if to ask how they _dared_ let her darling children anywhere close to a weapon. He still felt the need to do the same, sometimes. Fili was a man, by Athenian standards, and had finished his compulsory military service in the last years of the war, but Thorin rather thought that to him, at least, he would always be a child.

Fili’s shoulder pressed, just lightly, against his; with most other people the physical contact would have made him a little uncomfortable, but with him Thorin did not try to move away.

“How’s the ward setting in?” he asked, in a low voice, as he ran a thumb along the edge of the blade carefully. “This is good, you’re keeping it well.”

Fili nodded in acknowledgement of the praise.

“He’s fine. A little homesick, but Kee’s been drawing him out of his shell. He keeps asking us about the Gods, though, and their stories. He wants to know all about them.”

Thorin snorted as he passed the blade back.

“Balin said he was like that. You know them, don’t you?”

Fili pulled a wry expression, and Thorin laughed a little. The boys had never been the most attentive at the classes that Balin had insisted they sit through, though he could do little to criticise: Dis had learnt far more from his and Frerin’s tutors than either of them had, and she had been listening in from the courtyard, not allowed to sit and learn with them, but refusing to let that stop her.

“We’ll have to find him a tutor. What other blades have you got?”

Fili pulled a face, and Thorin shot him a withering look.

“ _Fili._ ”

With a slightly remorseful look Fili removed another short dagger from the carefully concealed sheath that he kept strapped to his upper arm; Thorin was not entirely surprised when a second appeared from his other arm, given that he himself had given Fili the sheaths (though he continued to blame Frerin every time Dis asked). One further raised eyebrow from Thorin produced a third blade from somewhere around his thigh, and with a final snort Thorin finally left him alone.

“Things went well at the docks yesterday?”

His nephew nodded, and Thorin settled back against the wall again, the stone already warm against his back.

Fili leant a little closer over Thorin’s arm as he began sharpening the now substantial pile of blades in his lap, watching even though there was no need for him to, his shoulders slumping slightly as Thorin began to hum a low song as he worked, mumbled words of his mother’s tongue that he barely understood but rolled across the courtyard with a deep and soothing fondness none the less. He had never learnt her tongue with any dedication, but the lullabies of his youth had remained with him anyway, for all that didn’t know the meaning behind them. He had sung them to both boys when they were younger, and more recently to Frerin too, in those awful days when infection had set in around his lost eye and he had hovered somewhere between this world and the next.

The sound of his voice must have echoed further than he had at first thought; after just a few moments a dark head of hair appeared from around a doorway, a beaming and boyish smile on a face that took much more after his mother than Fili did. Kili gave out a muffled ‘Good morning’ from around the bread that he had stuffed in his mouth and disappeared inside again, no doubt, as Fili muttered under his breath, to go and find the latest addition to their household and drag him out of their library, where the new ward had spent most of his time since arriving.

“Will you be able to find him a tutor?” Fili continued after a moment, eyes still on the blade in Thorin’s hands.

It was a fair enough question; whilst they were wealthy enough to afford any tutor from the citizen body in theory, most were uncomfortable enough working for metics who had been born in the city; teaching a young barbarian from across the Aegean, whose Greek was still a little patchy in places, would be a job almost certainly turned down by even the poorly-regarded tutors.

He nodded, none the less. He’d figure out a way.

Fili grinned as Thorin passed his swords back to him, slipping them away and out of sight quickly. He offered his Uncle a hand after he jumped to his feet, to pull Thorin up after him; Thorin took the hand, but tugged on it suddenly; Fili stumbled a little before shooting Thorin a rather petulant look.

Even just a decade or so earlier, Thorin would have stuck his tongue out at him; instead he just knocked their shoulders gently together after he too got to his feet.

Thorin was only two steps towards the kitchen, on his way to get some food, when a loud knock from the still-closed gateway to the street rang out. Fili glanced at him, as if asking if he should see who was there, but Thorin just shook his head, and went himself.

“Thorin, son of Thrain?”

The man on the other side of the door was familiar, though Thorin was not entirely sure where he had seen him before; perhaps in passing at someone’s house, or around the market place or docks. He looked Thorin up and down before asking the question in a quiet, hushed tone, as if afraid that someone might overhear them. Thorin nodded in reply, his brow contracting a little into a frown automatically as the man took half a step towards him, almost uncomfortably close to Thorin now, and almost through the doorway itself.

“Has anyone been here this morning?”

Thorin resisted the urge to step back, and shook his head.

“I have seen no one but my family.”

The man’s shoulders seemed to sink in relief; he moved back a little, offering Thorin a short bow, before drawing a bundle from behind his back. It was about the length of Thorin’s arm, and a little bulkier, and wrapped in long, white fabric.

“I’m a member of Gandalf’s household. He asked me to come, with news.”

Thorin felt himself relax, though not a lot; though Gandalf was a friend, in his own way, his news was rarely good, if it was even understandable to begin with.

“And?”

The messenger shuffled a little, casting his eyes down to the street.

“He was… arrested last night.”

Thorin started, surprised, Gandalf’s bizarre visit the week before suddenly making a little more sense; he felt something tighten in his chest in irritation. Couldn’t Gandalf have told him that this storm was on the horizon? He rubbed at his forehead, an ache of annoyance already cutting through the pleasant morning; he took an almost defensive step back into his own home, the bright sunlight catching his eye, almost blinding for a moment before he turned his head just enough to block it out.

“What happened?”

He wondered if his voice sounded as tired as he suddenly felt.

 “They… they arrived in the middle of the night. Gandalf told us that he would, he had me watching the gate throughout the night for a while now. They came, and they… took him away. He didn’t resist.”

“Why?” Thorin asked in reply, but the man just shrugged, still looking down at the ground.

“I’m not… he didn’t really tell us why, only that it would happen.”

Thorin rested his fist against the stone wall beside him with infinite care, resisting the urge just to slam his hand against it.

“Of course he wouldn’t,” he managed to say between gritted teeth. “Do we know what has happened to him?”

The messenger shook his head. “We’ve had no word whether he lives or not.”

Thorin sighed, just as a hand settled on his shoulder from behind.

“We would have heard if he did not-”

Balin cleared his throat.

“What’s going on, Thorin?”

He filled Balin in quickly, keeping one eye on the man in the gateway; Balin made a low noise of understanding.

“Well, that’s… hm. I’ll go get the family together.”

Thorin nodded, a little absentmindedly, before turning back to the messenger. “You said that you came with a message?”

“He told me to remind you that speed is off the essence.” The messenger pulled an odd, slightly disconcerted expression as he glanced quickly to meet Thorin’s expression. “I’m- does that make sense?”

Thorin nodded.

“And also to give you this.”

The man finally held out the bundle that he’d been carrying, and Thorin took it a little hesitantly; the fabric was soft, the kind of expensive material that would only have come from overseas, and the whole bundle was heavier than he had realised, a soft metallic noise sounding out as the package shifted in his hands. There was a part of him that wanted to ask the man what it was, but Thorin had a feeling that he would have no more to say on the matter than he had information about Gandalf; with a short nod and another bow he left, without a word.

Fili, hovering nearby, helped him close the door to the street, peering curiously at the package; before either of them could say anything Kili bounded out of the house, full grown but still with the slight gangly awkwardness of someone who hasn’t quite grown into their body. He nudged against his brother, grinning up at Thorin.

“Uncle! What is it?”

Fili bumped their shoulders, rolling his eyes.

“He’s not even opened it yet Kee, hold on a moment.”

Thorin was still looking down at the package, his face drawn into a frown that grew deeper as he began to pull at the rope twine holding the fabric in place. Frerin padded over next, still yawning, no doubt woken by Balin in something of a rush; Dwalin, only half-dressed, was right behind him. Vili kept half a step behind Dis, looming over her with his normal, half-distracted expression- in a matter of moments, his entire family had appeared around him, crowding around him.

“Thorin, what’s going on?”

“Balin said something about Gandalf?”

Thorin didn’t look up as the fabric fell back, revealing what was inside.

“What does it-“

“Is it-“

“Why-“

“Is that… a Persian sword?”

It was indeed; a long _akinakes_ blade, the kind given by Persian kings as a gift in reward for great services- or at least that was what Balin muttered when Dis asked him. They were rare enough that the sight was causing even Balin and Dwalin, who had travelled to the east on several occasions, to peer down in curiosity; it was lucky enough that they were there to identify them, because Thorin himself would have had no idea.

The handle was engraved, detailed and peculiar, the blade straight up one side and curved down the other; it was nothing at all like the usual swords forged around Athens, and yet the weight of it was already comfortable in his hand as he picked it out of the bundle, as if he had held something like this before; the thought was a little uncomfortable to him.

“No, look, there’s another one, a smaller one, see?”

Fili was still picking through the unwrapped package that had been placed on a ledge when Thorin had first picked up the blade, and true enough he drew another out, similar in decoration if not in shape; they looked a little like they might have been made as a matching pair, but the second was a little too small for Thorin. He nodded at it, letting Fili continue to run reverential hands over the bronze.  

“Why the hell did the mad old bastard send you a pair of Persian swords?”

Dwalin folded his arms across his broad, scarred chest, looking just as confused as a Thorin himself was feeling, shaking his head a little, in what could be either approval or disapproval, Thorin wasn’t entirely sure. Frerin reached over, tracing the carvings with a fingertip. He had forgotten the bandages he normally wore around his face in his haste, and Thorin was momentarily distracted by the brightness of the scar that cut across his now-lost eye. Frerin kept it covered most of the time, and it had been several weeks since he had last had a chance to see it: it unwound a tight coil of tension in his chest to see that it was still healing well, with no further signs of infection.

“What are you going to do with them?” he asked in a low voice, quietly pitched. Thorin glanced up once more, catching his eye, and shrugged.

“I’m not… sure.”

“Swords aside,” Dis said, a little impatiently, “Shouldn’t we be a little more concerned that our sponsor has been arrested?” Vili made a low noise of agreement, keeping back from the swords, a little uncomfortable with the focus on the blades: it had been left to Thorin and Frerin to teach their nephews how to use their own, Vili never quite happy around them. A life enslaved meant that he had never learnt how to use them himself, and had had them used on him more than once; he had been free for twenty years now, but still flinched at the sound of a sword being drawn, or a voice raised in anger.  

“It’s… he came by a few days ago,” Thorin replied, absentmindedly as he held the blade up to the light, watching the strange, twisting patterns that decorated it catch the sun. “With… instructions, I suppose, for what to do.”

Dis folded her arms; he could tell already that she was a little annoyed that he hadn’t already told him about Gandalf’s. No doubt he would pay for his silence alter, but for now she was content to just raise one eyebrow at him meaningfully, and tap her foot.

“And what do they consist of?”

“An address,” he replied, sliding the sword back into the sheath, “and a letter to give to the person there. He seemed confident that he would be willing to sponsor us.”

Dis made a low, unconvinced noise.

“Are you sure?”

Thorin sighed, not quite answering as he buckled the sheath of the longer sword to his belt and, after a moment of consideration, wrapped the second, shorter blade up again.

“I’ll sort it out.”

 

* * *

 

 

When Bilbo woke that day, it was to the loud noise of a bird at his window, staring in through the shutters at him reprovingly, as if unimpressed that he was still in bed. He grumped a little, but pulled himself out of the nest of sheets anyway.

There was a child crying somewhere nearby, their cries echoing oddly in the street, louder and then quieter again, rebounding and peculiar.

Bombur was humming in the kitchen when Bilbo went to get breakfast, but his eyes were distant, darting out the window in distraction, as if searching for something that wasn’t quite there, but that he expected to appear.

“Is everything alright?” Bilbo asked, not entirely convinced that it was. Bombur had a thick bandage of fabric tied around his wrist, hiding his slave brand; he rarely bothered to hide it these days, only when he was feeling insecure, only that wasn’t the right word: when he wasn’t feeling _right._

The three of them had occasionally tried to explain it to him, that _wrongness_ that sometimes struck them _,_ but they would always eventually lapse into their own tongue, arguing as they tried to decide on how best to explain themselves. It was an odd, melodic language compared to Greek; he still remembered being a little bemused by it at first, how it hadn’t corresponded with what he thought a Carian would sound like. A warlike people, his father had muttered to him when he had pressed him for details of the people living in a wide world that he might never see; worshippers of strange and violent Gods. Harsh and bitter; but their own language was almost gentle, unexpectedly soft in its sibilance.

“Bifur,” Bombur replied, after a long moment. “He’s… having a bad day.”

Bilbo nodded, and padded away from his distracted friend when it became clear that he wasn’t going to be saying anything else.

And there Bifur was, sat in the courtyard, a small piece of wood in his lap that he might have been whittling down into a tiny animal at some point that morning; he’d been distracted since then, though, and was now feeding scraps of his fish from his breakfast to one of the many stray cats that had a habit of wandering into the courtyard, knowing that there were several members of the household unable to resist feeding them.

There was wine poured at the altar already, in front of the bowl of hand-carved wooden keys.

A sign of change, Bofur might have said if he were there, interpreting his kinsmen. A sign of something new.

“How are you?”

Bifur just shook his head, glancing at the open doorway out to the street beyond.

The cat made a happy sound, and pushed his head against Bilbo’s leg for a moment.

Bifur took his hand, and mumbled something that he didn’t understand.

 

* * *

 

The house was a little peculiar looking, shabby around the edges but clearly well-loved, in its own way; the paint was flaking a little from the walls outside and the stonework was cracked in places, but the weeds surrounding the gate had been pulled up, as they hadn’t been in any of the other, surrounding homes. It wasn’t at all what Thorin had expected from a citizen who was supposed to help them; it looked more to him like they would be the ones in need.

Thorin watched it cautiously from the opposite side of the road for a long while, waiting for the inevitable bustle of slaves and family members, but none came; a shadow passed across the courtyard briefly, at one point, but he had not been able to make out to whom it belonged.

Oddly quiet then, as well.

There were potted plants in the courtyard, even from his limited vantage point able to see that there was an unusual amount of them, fresh and healthy looking despite the summer heat.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have expected anything else from a friend of Gandalf’s.

He took a step closer, and then another, until he was at the doorway proper; there was a man in the courtyard that caught sight of him, a bright and distracted look in his eyes, his forehead mottled with the great remains of some old and brutal scar. It lacked the defined shape of something done by a blade, looking more instead like the cracked surface of a statue when a limb was knocked off it. Thorin nodded at him, and the man did not move, though his hand moved to his hip quickly.

But before he could do, or say, anything at all, a small child barrelled into his legs as he came running full pace around the corner, laughing until he rebounded off Thorin, landing firmly on the ground.

His cheeks were not quite as round as they should be for a healthy boy of his age, but his eyes were bright and interested, even as his lip began to wobble a little at the sudden tumble he had taken.  

“Frodo, I-“

Another man appeared, smaller than he himself was, and it took a moment for Thorin to realise why he had frozen, staring up at Thorin with his mouth a little open still, in shock. He had gone oddly pale, his eyes darting quickly to the gate and then back to him, keeping his eye on where he was whilst reaching for the boy, pulling him to his feet and propelling him behind him, back in the direction of the house.

“I-“

He wasn’t entirely sure what he had been intending to say, because he suddenly realised why the man looked so familiar, why he looked so scared.

Thorin had met him, and recently.

The man made a strange, aborted noise, half-way between protestation and fear.

Thorin’s eyes narrowed.

_“Thief.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally. Urgh. Thanks for your patience. 
> 
> northerntrash.tumblr.com if you want to talk. :)


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